1 Lawrence of Yugoslavia: An Allied Awakening inside a Civil War Together we were close to each other in body and soul But did the mountains divide us Or the rivers? As David saith, ye mountains of Gilboa Let there be no dew, neither let there be rain, For Saul you did not save, nor Jonathon, O the mercifulness of David O ye kings, O hear Is it Saul you are bewailing, O Founder? For I found, saith the Lord, A man after my own heart. —H OMAGE TO LOVE , Serbian sacred poetry, Prince Stefan Lazarevi c´ to his brother COPYRIGHTEDPrince Vuk Lazarevic MATERIAL´, thirteenth century n the autumn of 1943, a tall, gallant officer from the American I wartime intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), crisscrossed the mountains of Partisan- held Serbia and Bosnia on horse- back and on foot in search of lost and wounded American airmen who, en route from Allied air bases in Italy to the Axis - coveted oil fields at 32 cc01.indd01.indd 3322 110/9/090/9/09 110:04:570:04:57 AAMM LAWRENCE OF YUGOSLAVIA 33 Ploesti, in Romania, had been shot down by German air patrols. The thirty - two - year - old, Minnesota - born - and - bred major Linn M. “ Slim ” Farish was a multitalented engineer who specialized in the building of aerodromes and had previously worked all over the world as an oil geologist, but he was known in the OSS as “ Lawrence of Yugoslavia, ” for his epic - worthy stoic heroism in that broken land and his passionate concern for its political and democratic future. Farish would hardly have described himself in such romantic terms, but others did. His “ ability, integrity, loyalty, unselfish devotion to duty and great love for his fellow men caused him to be held in the highest respect, admiration, and affection by Americans, British and Yugoslavs, ” one OSS report commented on the charismatic leader of the rescue mis- sion. 1 He was so impatient for action that he enlisted in the Canadian army before America ’ s entry into the war in order to get onto the battle- fields of World War II as quickly as possible. Farish ’ s daring alarmed even his future boss, OSS director William J. Donovan, who was also known for his enthusiastic pursuit of heroic missions. Donovan warned Farish that if he did not stop his search for the downed airmen, the young adventurer would collapse from exhaustion. “ Major Farish refused to listen to our protests, ” wrote one OSS officer in a memo summarizing Donovan ’ s plea, “ because he knew that American airmen (some of them wounded) were in hourly peril and he was confident he could bring them out safely. ” 2 The stubborn Farish ignored the appeals of the will- ful Donovan, and into the summer of 1944 he continued to comb the mountains of Serbia in hopes of finding his missing comrades. For over two and a half years before Farish ’ s arrival, Yugoslavia had been embroiled in a violent civil war within the larger World War II southeast - Balkan theater. This civil war pitted the Partisan - Communist forces of that country and the royalist - nationalist Chetniks against each other; both of these groups fought against the Axis - controlled terror of the Croatian Usta š e, whose main target, in turn, was the Serbian pop- ulation in general. Farish, Stanford University – educated and a former Olympic star, had been named the OSS ’ s senior American officer in the Anglo - American Mission to Tito ’ s Yugoslav National Liberation Army, made up that autumn of around 300,000 men organized across eleven corps and numerous divisions, brigades, and squadrons. Farish arrived on that mission by parachute on September 16, 1943, with British brigadier cc01.indd01.indd 3333 110/9/090/9/09 110:04:580:04:58 AAMM 34 SHADOWS ON THE MOUNTAIN Fitzroy Maclean, serving under the aristocratic Scotsman ’ s command, while himself serving as commanding officer of a sub - mission to locate downed airmen and organize their evacuation from Yugoslavia. Traveling thousands of miles over mountainous terrain through enemy terri- tory, Farish located and developed the first evacuation landing strips in Yugoslavia within remote, hard - won pockets of anti - Axis resistance. His intelligence gathering would serve as the basis for the Anglo - American supply program to the Partisans. He was “ a large rugged man like a bear, with an amiable grin, ” wrote Maclean of his American mission partner in his memoir Eastern Approaches . “ Call me ‘ Slim, ’ ” said Farish to his equally passionate British counterpart, and thus began what Maclean described as an excellent friendship and working partnership between the two men — although one, it will be seen, quietly rife with Anglo - American rivalry. 3 The extraordinary distances Farish crossed in the Balkans resulted in his aiding in the rescue of around a hundred American and Allied air- men with the help of fellow mission members and the Partisans them- selves. Farish would undertake three missions to Yugoslavia, including additional briefing missions to OSS headquarters in Cairo and to OSS chief Donovan in Washington, D.C., between September 1943 and the early summer of 1944, with one final visit in August 1944. The missions included Farish ’ s arrival at Tito ’ s then headquarters at Jajce, in western Bosnia, during September and October 1943 to locate land- ing grounds for the future evacuation of downed airmen, and again in January and March 1944, when Farish and fellow officer Lieutenant Eli Popovich met with Tito personally to ask for the Partisan leader ’ s aid in helping the organization of those rescues. Farish would return once again in April through June 1944, this time to Macedonia as part of the OSS ’ s Columbia mission with Popovich and wireless transmission opera- tor Arthur Jibilian. Despite the constant menace of Axis forces, Farish’ s operations in Yugoslavia were successful across the board, owing, as he saw it, to the well - organized Partisans, whom he admired greatly and whom he found, as a resistance movement, to be “ comparable with the American revolutionary war. ” 4 The first American flyer to be evacuated from Yugoslavia was a P - 47 pilot, Lieutenant Gerald Johnson, who, in January 1944, had been rescued from the Yugoslav mainland by the Partisans and later evacuated from the cc01.indd01.indd 3344 110/9/090/9/09 110:04:580:04:58 AAMM LAWRENCE OF YUGOSLAVIA 35 Adriatic island of Vis, Tito ’ s Partisan headquarters as of November 1943, under Farish ’ s direction. When Lieutenant Johnson mentioned that he had not been adequately briefed prior to his mission regarding the free areas in Yugoslavia, Farish obtained some maps and outlined those areas of Yugoslavia where Axis forces had no immediate presence. These became the first accurate escape maps developed for the use of the U.S. Army Air Corps in Yugoslavia. Farish ’ s success in evacuating the airmen was largely the result of the OSS decision to enhance its mission presence and its military aid to the Partisans in early 1944, following the general exploration of Partisan territory that Farish undertook in the autumn of 1943 under Brigadier Maclean ’ s command. Farish was still attached to Maclean ’ s mission when he returned to Yugoslavia for the third time, on a mission to Macedonia formally under the command of British major John Henniker - Major, on April 16, 1944. Accompanied once again by the American lieutenant Eli Popovich and Arthur Jibilian, Farish parachuted into German - held territory in Macedonia in Vranje, near the border of Bulgaria. Their immediate assignment was to locate areas in enemy territory suitable for use as landing fields that would make it possible to rescue downed American and Allied airmen, whose numbers were starting to reach into the hundreds. The first four airmen the three encountered were the survivors of an attempted air raid on the Ploesti fields, who had landed near Skopje and were brought to Major Farish by the Macedonian Partisan leader General Mihailo Apostolski, who would accompany Farish, Jibilian, and Popovich during the time they were in Macedonia. When the Partisans around Vranje suddenly came under attack by Bulgarian and Chetnik forces, the party ended up marching six days and five nights “ almost entirely with- out sleep ” and under fire for most of that time. After crossing the main Skopje - Nis (Serbia) railway line on April 23, 1944, they passed again through enemy lines at Leskovac, located in southern Serbia on the direct route to Salonika, “ in the full light ” of Axis searchlights used to protect the entrance to the city, once one of Serbia ’ s most flourishing. 5 Confronted with what would become an ongoing threat from Axis forces, the men left Leskovac, crossing enemy lines near the area of Topli cˇ a, in the southeastern corner of Serbia, near the Macedonian bor- der and surrounded by the wild Kopaonik Mountains. At Topli cˇ a, Farish ’ s cc01.indd01.indd 3355 110/9/090/9/09 110:04:590:04:59 AAMM 36 SHADOWS ON THE MOUNTAIN party established a makeshift headquarters in the Radan Mountains, one of the largest mountain ranges in southern Serbia. Ever on the move from hostile Bulgarian troops, the men later passed under a rain of rifle fire through the enemy lines to the Macedonian mountain chain known as the Bela Kamen, where the Serbians and their French and British allies had fought decisive battles at the Salonika Front in 1917 and 1918. Over the course of several miserable weeks in this Macedonian outback, and directing themselves toward the Serbia - Kosovo border, Farish finally found a site he considered suitable for use as a landing field for evacua- tions: Lipovica, a prominent village with a nearby airfield, located near where the borders of Kosovo, Montenegro, and Serbia meet.